By: Ivan Alieksieiev

The concept of justice, a cornerstone of philosophical inquiry, has been interpreted in myriad ways throughout history, reflecting its complexity and enduring relevance. This text examines classical perspectives on justice, focusing on the contributions of figures such as Polemarchus, Thrasymachus, and Glaucon, before delving into Plato’s vision in the Republic. Plato’s conception of justice intertwines the structure of the ideal state (Kallipolis) with the harmony of the individual soul, as I believe, rooted in his dualistic metaphysical views. The discussion also addresses the contentious interpretation of the Republic as a proto-totalitarian text, evaluating its emphasis on virtue and the Good against critiques of its rigid hierarchy and control. By exploring these themes, the text highlights the interplay between politics, ethics, and metaphysics in Plato’s thought and its implications for understanding justice.

To begin with, the question of justice and its attributes could be unqualifiedly put in the category of, as people in the International Relations field would say, the enduring questions. The concept seems to be so complex that it allows for many interpretations to appear. Polemarch stated probably the most intuitive notion of justice: that it is to return to a man what he deserves. While being induced by Socrates to clarify this, Polemarch added that it is the duty of friends to commit good things to friends while not evil. It becomes obvious here that the purpose of justice is to pursue social contracts and engage in partnership. A radically different view is presented by the sophist, Thrasymachus, who outrageously stated that justice is merely the advantage of the stronger of this world. More specifically, stronger rulers postulate laws favorable to them, and those declared to be “just.” Those who disobey should be fiercely punished. Thus, justice is merely a word to cover power relations. It somehow feels unpleasant and perhaps even falls, but it is not that easy to find where. I tried to question this Thrasymachus approach by applying the simplified form of what, probably, Socrates would do.

P₁: Laws are aimed at making people’s lives better

P₂: A law which makes people worse off is bad

P₃: A law which makes people better off is good

P₄: To pass a bad law, which makes people worse off, is bad

P₅: To pass a good law, which makes people better off, is good

P₆: If there are laws passed in the world that make people worse off, there are bad laws passed in the world.

P₇: If there are laws passed in the world that make people better off, there are good laws passed in the world.

P₈: There are definitely some laws passed in the world that make people better off (E.g. constitution)

C₁: There are definitely some good laws passed in the world

P₉: Laws that make people better off often put a constraint on those who pass them (e.g. the constitutional checks/balances, or laws of Athenian democracy [e.g., isonomia – equality before the law] for better historical context.) 

P₁₀: If P₉ is wrong, then Thrasymachus’ “justice” notion is right. If P₉ is right, the Thrasymachus’ “justice” notion is false.

C₂: Thrasymachus’ “justice” notion is false.

This logical syllogism looks quite understandable and relevant unless it contains a hidden but all-undermining mistake. Yes, the points made are persuasive for us, but, as Dr. Janusz Salamon at the Faculty of Social Sciences of Charles University argues, they are absolutely not for Thrasymachus. The thing is that Thrasymachus would disagree with the very first premise: that laws are aimed at making people’s lives better off. As portrayed in Plato’s Republic, he would likely reject the notion that laws are intrinsically aimed at the common good. Instead, he would argue that laws are imposed by those in power to consolidate their dominance and ensure their continued advantage. For example, in a tyrannical regime, laws might be designed to suppress dissent, exploit resources, or maintain inequality—clearly not for the betterment of the people but for the benefit of the rulers. Thrasymachus would see my premise (P1) as naive, ignoring the self-serving nature of those who wield power. Moreover, Thrasymachus might challenge the idea that “good laws” (those that make people better) are passed with any altruistic intent. Even if some laws appear to benefit the people, he could argue that these are merely concessions made by the powerful to prevent rebellion or to maintain stability, which ultimately serves their own interests. For instance, a constitution might grant rights to citizens, but Thrasymachus would likely see this as a strategic move to placate the masses rather than a genuine effort to promote justice.

The notion of justice presented by Glaucon is somehow a colliding of Polemarchus and Thrasymachus’ views. It is perceived that the best outcome for personal relations is to do injustice while not being punished. Therefore, the worst outcome is to suffer injustice without the possibility to retaliate. Justice, Glaucon argues, stands in the middle, in the sense that if people’s desires and devotions aren’t curbed, conventional relationships are hardly possible. Therefore, justice stands to be a human invention to control humans’ natural inclinations. Here we see a peculiar combination of Thrasymachus’ notion of “justice as a strictly human artifact” and Polemarchus’ idea that justice is a result of human agreement rather than the oppression of the weak.

Plato, spoken through Socrates in The Republic, conveys the idea of justice through particularly connected but still separate matters of the Ideal State—Kallipolis—and the personal order of the soul. He begins by arguing that the Kallipolis is able to show the reconstruction of how injustice appeared through portraying what can be called “Justice of the city.” The city is constituted by three classes: first, the producing class, which is of artisans and merchants; second, the class of guardians (or auxiliaries), which plays a crucial role in maintaining the city’s order and defending it from external and internal threats; and third, the class of philosopher-kings, who are devoted to the matter of the good life of the city. The classes themselves are carried by three virtues: the wisdom of the philosopher-king, the courage of the guardians, and the moderation which is present in both the producing class and the ruling one. In order to maintain just harmony, there must not be inter-class interruptions; one shall do one job to do it appropriately, and one must prevent any man from attaining what belongs to another or from being deprived of what is his own. I would not delve deeper into the justice of power acquisition in the Ideal City, except for briefly explaining why the philosophers particularly are assigned to be rulers. The justification of the philosopher-rulers, Plato argues, is that only philosophers are able to harmonize the city as they study the form of the good; they know, so to say, “the way out of the cave,” and their intentions are purely driven by agathon (ἀγαθόν), the ultimate principle of reality and the source of all truth, beauty, and justice. It is the highest object of knowledge, and understanding it is the goal of the philosopher-kings.

Individual justice is strongly bound to the classes of the city. Plato presents an individual as constituted by three parts of the soul. The rational part, which enables one to acquire knowledge and wisdom and which dominates in the philosopher-rulers, the spirited part, driven by anger and courage, is a trait of the guardians and the bodily desires’ part, which drags one toward pleasures. It is important to mention that philosopher-rulers are also affected by desires (since reason itself is motionless, there are desires required to reach any progress), but these desires are aimed at learning and attaining wisdom. In the well-ordered soul, reason governs over the whole, as the “just man won’t let other parts of the soul do the job of others.” We will return to this part later, but have you already seen the connection? In the one-whole just city, the reasonable philosopher directs the city toward flourishing, whereas the rule of reason in the one-whole “well-ordered” soul of the individual maintains the curb of just harmony. As Dr. Salamon interpreted Plato: “You can’t create a virtuous society without virtuous citizens.”

For Plato, the people of the Ideal City are not equal, just as the soul’s order requires certain subordination. Ergo, justice stands to be a relation between unequals—a relation of command and obedience, justified by the aim of the philosopher/reason’s promise to reach the ultimate good, the exit from Plato’s cave. Plato applies these contemplations to the political aspect, emphasizing the worst of them, which are under the rule of the spirited or appetitive (bodily desire) parts. Timarchy (from Greek τιμή timē, “honor, worth” and -κρατία -kratia, “rule”) is described as a regime where rulers are driven by the spirited part of the soul, so the attention of governors is magnetized to arete (ἀρετή), the ideal heroic excellence and virtue of honor and reputation of the warrior-killer. Plato points out that no harmony can be reached through a killer-ruled city. Democracy is ruled through the spirited part, according to Plato, and, as Dr. Salamon interprets, it is driven by emotions, where ambitions promote rules of honor. Oligarchy rulers are bound by their bodily appetites, where their consumption extends beyond leisure to the luxurious mode of life, which hardly represents the good of telos. Through the soul theory, Plato is criticizing the norms and ideals of that time, whereas his attitude toward democracy describes Athenian democracy of the period, which is conceived as dominated by commercial interests and where desires had corrupted humans’ souls.

The core of Plato’s justice can also be called hero-centric, but instead of the arete-warrior, there is the praised techne philosopher-hero. Each class in the Kallipolis has a specific “craft”—technē (τέχνη): the philosopher-kings practice the “craft of ruling,” the guardians practice the “craft of defense,” and the producers practice various crafts like farming, building, and weaving. Contrasting with the previous Greek concept of justice, Plato regards coercion as only possible for keeping just order, not for penitentiary implementation. For Plato, justice is the object of craft, whose goal is to build just order and improve people’s character by utilizing the most appropriate means.

By introducing Plato’s attitude toward coercion, we’ve come close to the intricate topic of “Totalitarian Plato.” To navigate through it smoothly, I’ll first raise probable similarities of The Republic’s Kallipolis order and what we call totalitarian rule and then present a counter argument right after.

As Dr. Salamon describes, Plato believed that in order to “cultivate oneself through virtuousness,” several conditions must be met. First, the old traditions have to be abolished, and old ideals stopped from being praised in order to remove obstacles on the way of individual development. Indeed, as H. Arendt in her book Ideology and Terror (1953) states, “traditions must be rejected as they impede the development of humanity through laws of Nature or history.” Plato proposed to ban some of Homer’s books as they promote the arete ideal (e.g., Achilles from the Iliad), where people’s souls were constituted by two parts: desires, prescribed to all humans, and anger—a very heroic trait of the “best sons of Greece,” which obviously confronts the necessary for a well-ordered state submission to the rule of reason.

Autonomy is a highly questioned aspect of Kallipolis, as “voluntary submission” in the command/obedience relation leaves very little room for individual moral development and organization of one’s life. Furthermore, it comes very close to what I. Berlin described as positive freedom, particularly of Fascist ideology—”as an individual within the most important, the state, you are free to obey” in his book Two Concepts of Liberty (1958). Books are imposed on censorship, kids are to be isolated from parents and be educated by “professionals” as parents lack competence, guardians are to be deprived of property, and their marriage should be regulated. Except maybe for the last, this resembles what is described as one very important trait of totalitarianism—state control over individual life. More specifically, the guardians’ deprivation of property and the regulation that, as Dr. Salamon mentions, “Rulers should have no property or children to pass ‘dynastic’ rule.” As Arendt emphasizes, the state’s control over the individual in the totalitarian state must be absolute, as it “derives power from isolating the individual from public affairs, imposing loneliness as a catalyst for the emergence of logical (and then through the adaptive mechanisms of survival within the state which operates from logic—Ideo-logical) thinking”  (Arendt, 1953). In contrast, the state’s control could not be full in The Republic, because the aim is not to isolate individuals or suppress their moral development but to harmonize the soul and the city through education, virtue, and the pursuit of the Good, with the philosopher-kings guiding citizens toward true knowledge and justice rather than enforcing ideological conformity for its own sake. Furthermore, while laws in a totalitarian state, according to Arendt, are enforced by “eliminating objective enemies of Nature/history” (Arendt, 1953),  Plato’s coercion is to be treated only as coercion of paternalistic character, of a wise teacher over young and naïve pupils, or as a submission of a patient before the expertise of a doctor.

Finally, it has been declared that Plato ostensibly exalted the State over the Individual. However, the counterargument to this statement is in Plato’s Republic itself. As Dr. Salamon argues, it is not a coincidence that Plato begins by elaborating on the well-ordered state and moves on to the harmony of the individual’s soul. Dr. Salamon believes that “There is a good chance that Plato’s Republic transmits not Plato’s political view but is about an individual within the state. The Kallipolis serves as a whole to the parts, to the individual souls, in contrast to the totalitarian regime,” where, as Arendt states, the life of the individual is neglected and readily sacrificed to achieve the “movement of the state according to the truths of nature/history” (Arendt, 1953). As already has been said: “You can’t create a virtuous society without virtuous citizens.”

Finally, I would like to present a peculiar fact of metaphysical connection in Plato’s beliefs. You see, Plato is a dualist, which means that he believes that there are two worlds. The first is the one of everyday things and appearances, the world inside the cave where people observe shadows on the cave walls as something ultimately true. The other one is the world of ideal things, of ultimate truth—of Plato’s forms. We can’t access the world of Forms directly, but we can apply the ideal representative of a certain group (for example, an ideal form of a triangle while working with earthly approximations) to what we have to try to reach the truth. In order for one to cultivate the soul in the ideal, “well-ordered” way, there has to be a certain form of the soul, an ideal representation on which we can rely. Plato’s Kallipolis seems to me to be that form, which, though inaccessible directly, can provide vital analogies to draw on the relatively accessible “inner world” of a person. As the order of the Ideal State is in harmony due to the voluntary submission of the guardians and producing class to the rule of wisdom-driven philosophers, one should be governed by reason, which allows for reaching the virtues necessary for a good citizen.

References

1.   Key text: Plato.Key text: (1992). The Republic (G. M. A. Grube, Trans., revised by C. D. C. Reeve). Hackett Publishing. (Original work published circa 380 BCE)

2.   Arendt, H. (1953). Ideology and terror. In The Origins of Totalitarianism. Harcourt Brace Jovanovich.

3.     Berlin, I. (1958). Two concepts of liberty. Oxford University Press.